


Your Familial Environment

by itdefiesimagination



Category: In the Flesh (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-31
Updated: 2015-07-31
Packaged: 2018-04-12 06:58:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4469642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/itdefiesimagination/pseuds/itdefiesimagination
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"This is nice and I'm completely fine with it!"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Your Familial Environment

**Author's Note:**

> Another piece of pointless fluff, originally posted on my tumblr. This is the version with fewer typos . . . so I guess you can decide which you'd rather read. Hey, maybe you prefer a more authentic experience! Or maybe you prefer commas in the right places and words spelled correctly. Or maybe you're a ghost. (If you are, please hit me up. I would like to talk to a ghost.)

Honestly.

If his life were a wall and injustices pictures hung upon that wall, this one would be at the pinnacle. (That’s assuming these pictures are arranged in some sort of tasteful triangle – he’s an artist, credit where credit is due. Come on.)

This picture, this injustice, would be an 8x10 and it would have one of those frames with inspirational messages frosted into the glass – ‘Home is Where the Heart Is!’ ‘Friends!’ ‘Sisters Forever! Whether You Like It Or Not, Patrice!’ You know, one of those frames people hate but buy for their relatives anyway, because who knows what the hell else to buy their relatives.

(Giftcards say ‘So I heard you like buying things and also eating, maybe!’

Highly personalized gifts say ‘I did some research into your life that you didn’t expect me to do … Your secrets are a Google search away, cousin. A Google search away.’

Frames with messages? ‘I know your familial relationship to me, and I tolerate it enough to see it written on glass. But I don’t tolerate it that much! Ha, no, this was not expensive.’ Tacky. Terrible. Perfect. )

Honestly.

This picture, this injustice, would be the yearbook photo your mother loves – the yearbook photo you _hate_.

This picture, this injustice, was the proverbial icing on the proverbial (inedible) cake. 

Honestly.

He can’t even eat.

“I’m not doing this,” he says aloud and then feels ridiculous for it, because the kitchen is empty and he’s already soaked up to the elbows in a rotten swirl of dish water and bits of old food. He feels his gag reflex kicking in – post-mortem. That _should_ be impossible, and yet here he is, steadying himself against a swell of nausea. So … wow, great! Another miracle! One more and he’ll be a saint. Do saints have to wash dishes?

(No, idiot, they cure blind people.)

(Yeah, but that’s just one thing. People can do more than one thing, and saints can probably do more things than regular people. So.)

(Hey, fuck you!! You died and came back – you know there’s no heaven, and if there’s no heaven, why would there be saints?)

(… ?)

(Yeah. Exactly.)

With a whine of dissatisfaction (who had decided to eat _yogurt_? And why had they only finished half the bowl?), Kieren pulls his hands from the sink. The unwashed dishes respond with a loud, tectonic shift, and he glances over his shoulder, exhales when the rest of the Walker family seems undisturbed by the crash. The gentle thrum of conversation persists, no one shouts at him, and his forearms are free from the marshy suction of dinners past.

He runs his hands under the clean tap for a moment before toweling them off to the elbows. Jem should be the one doing this, he thinks. She still eats and, in contributing to the mess, should do her fair share in cleaning it up. He doesn’t eat – therefore his fair share is no share at all.

Still, there’s a special sort of guilt that comes with not doing something you shouldn’t have to do in the first place, though maybe it’s not guilt so much as basic, human decency. Whatever it is, it makes him sweep his eyes over the kitchen one last time, looking for items that escaped the first round of collection. Someone had left a plate out on the counter, empty but for a piece of the dessert bread Sue Walker seemed to enjoy making – with almonds, and wheat flour, and an oven left on in deep Summer. He loves his mother, but her ‘cakes’ aren’t cakes, and that had been one of the (less traumatic, to be sure) disappointments of his first life.

Without thinking, he pops the bread into his mouth, chews absently for a minute, then stops in his tracks. Now, his sense memory allows him to recall most tastes and smells from before he died. (He also remembers how paper cuts feel, which is less enjoyable and kind of unfair.) It’s a little like those times when you’re so hungry that you can imagine in full detail the food you want to eat, except he isn’t ever hungry, and he tries to avoid picturing unrealties, if he can help it. Sometimes, though, sometimes he just remembers, and that’s how he knows this bread tastes like cinnamon. This bread _tastes_. He _tastes_.

Then, he gags. It’s more surprise than sickness – it’s been years and he honestly can’t remember how it feels to swallow real food – but he searches desperately for a place to set down the plate in his hands before doubling over the sink.

On the outskirts of his senses, along with a high ringing in his ears, he hears the door at the end of the kitchen galley squeal open. “Uh … ”

Simon steps over the threshold, gingerly shutting the door behind him. He grimaces. “Did you just . . . spit someth – ”

Kieren tries to face him, attempts a rough approximation of “ _Oh my god_ ” around the food in his mouth, though the end result is more of an “oorhhgamph.” He ducks back over the sink to spit out the rest of the bread.

“Wow. Nice to see you, too?”

“Simon!” Kieren greets him, too loud in his excitement. He wipes his mouth with the back of his sleeve. “Hi, sorry, did you see that!”

“Unfortunately.”

“I could taste! I tasted something! Oh my God, I just – I was looking for – I was putting this plate in this sink, but there was something on it, and I ate it, and I could taste it!”

“Interesting,” says Simon, sounding more confused than interested, and more disgusted than confused. Still, he unzips his coat and hangs it over his arm, so he must not have any designs on leaving. “Well, um, you certainly didn’t _eat_ whatever that was.”

“I could t – ”

“Because you spit it into the sink. Right in front of me. And that’s … Yeah, I didn’t enjoy watching that.”

“You’re sort of missing the big picture here, Simon!”

“That you’re ill?”

He looks so lost that, when Kieren kisses him, it’s half excitement, half sympathy, but Simon makes a noise of protest in the back of his throat and Kieren pulls away.

“Sorry, oh god,” he says, jerking his hands away from Simon’s face on instinct. “Sorry. Should I say sorry?” 

Simon winces. “No, you’re alright. You just – you know … the whole sink thing.”

“Oh, _seriously_?” Kieren scoffs, and as quickly as his anxiety had set in, it evaporates. He shoves Simon backward. “Don’t be a child. You literally rose from the dead. You were buried, in the ground, in the dirt, for God knows how long. How are your standards this high?”

Simon half turns away from him for a minute, turns back, then throws his hands up in exasperation. “Okay! Fine! Just do it, then! Jesus Christ.”

“Wow! That is _so_ romantic.”

“Romantic? You spit something into the sink!”

“I was excited!”

“What the hell does that mean?!”

“It means I’m coming back to life – now, can we please get this over with?”

Simon’s mouth forms the shape of a word, but not the sound. His eyes are wide and just when Kieren’s sure he’s about to demand elaboration, he hears instead:

“If you want.”

“If _you_ want.”

“Sure!”

“Fine!”

“Whatever.”

“I don’t even – ”

Simon reaches for Kieren’s face with both hands and they kiss more out of necessity than anything. (Right?) No turning back after all that, so let’s just get this over with, and then discuss the whole coming-back-to-life-after-coming-back-to-life thing, and then make awkward small talk with the family for a bit, because that’s why he’d invited Simon over in the first place, to make a first impression after the disaster that was his first impression, to make a second-first impression, and this didn’t even matter, because why would it even matter, ha, it was just …

. . . 

Except his hand may or may not have found its way to the back of Simon’s head, because kissing may or may not feel very different when the nerves inside your mouth actually work. And he may or may not have been testing that hypothesis, just scientifically, and it may or may not have been more enjoyable than the food-sink-scandal prelude had suggested. And there may or may not have been a voice coming from the kitchen doorway

“This is nice and I’m completely fine with it!”

Kieren jolts, feels Simon do the same, and their teeth clash with the speed of their separation (which hurts more than it should, considering.) 

“And your mother didn’t make me promise to say either of those things in the event of a situation like this! Hypothetically! Hypothetically, your mother made me promise to say to say those things.” Steve pales, in one hand an empty coffee mug, tilting limp and forgotten. “ _Didn’t_ make me promise to say those things! His mother!” He points at Kieren with his free hand.

Kieren looks down at the accusatory finger, then looks back up to glare, scandalized. “Dad!” he begins, once the wave of numb/cold/nausea folds itself back into his chest – the shock of sudden embarrassment molting away for the slow burn of embarrassment realized.

He feels fingers on his scalp, pushing his hair behind his ears, and he swats Simon’s hands away.

“Simon, what are you – ? He knows you weren’t fixing my hair, okay? Why would you be doing that?”

“Sorry,” Simon mutters, crossing his arms over his chest as if to prevent himself from doing any more harm and turning to Steve. “Sorry. I wasn’t fixing his hair, I was just pretending to do that. Just now. To lie to you.”

“Er, yes, I know,” Steve says, his expression pained. He shakes his head and for a moment his stuttering is replaced by frank disbelief, “Why – why on earth would you be fixing his hair?”

“I don’t know why I did that! I’m sorry!”

Kieren screws his eyes shut. He doesn’t want to see anything. Ever again. “Dad, Leave! Wait, no, stay here! We’ll leave.”

“No, no, no, I can leave! If you’re – ” Steve brings his free hand and his coffee mug up defensively.

“Okay, fine,” Kieren says. “We’ll stay! You leave.”

“It’s alright, we don’t have to stay,” Simon interrupts.

“I can stay, if you boys would rather leave! I just came to get more coffee, and this whole situation is fine. It’s enjoyable, actually!”

Kieren recoils. “What the _fuck_ – ”

“Hey, don’t swear! I’m attempting to make your, um, your familial environment as comfortable and accepting as possible. It’s what all those pamphlets say to do. I can leave.”

“He can leave. We can stay,” says Simon.

“Do you want to stay?” Kieren directs the question at Steve.

“I don’t have to,” Steve shrugs.

“Well, do you want to leave?!”

“Do _you_ want to leave?”

“I … kind of want to leave.”

“Simon – !”

“Who’s staying?!”

“DAD. LEAVE.”

Steve raises his hands/mug again, higher this time, and backs out of the room. He doesn’t attempt to refill his coffee before he goes, meaning he’d either forgotten or given up his second cup as a casualty of sitcom cliché.

A minute or so passes, with Simon and Kieren having fully and hastily disentangled themselves from one another, both now with their backs to the cabinets and their arms crossed.

“In the spirit of full disclosure,” Kieren says, finally, breaking the silence. “That was uncomfortable for me.”

Simon nods wordlessly and there is another silent pause. Then: 

“So, if we have the kitchen, we should probably capitalize on it. I’m not going to be able to look him in the eye for at least a week anyway, I might as well make the most of it.”

“I’m not sure what that means.”

Kieren makes a quick survey up and down the galley kitchen – true, Steve had left them to themselves, but there were two other people in the house, and Jem’s ability to ignore social niceties was, frankly, admirable. (She didn’t hold doors open for small children, because, in her words, she was ‘already going to die before them, so she didn’t owe them anything.’ Something as trivial as their little kitchen scene would not win her sympathies.)

When he was certain the coast was clear, Kieren glances once again to the left, once again to the right, and attempts to hoist himself up onto the counter. Question: do you still call it an attempt if you succeed on the third try, or can you call it a victory? Either way, there’s a dish rack pressing into his lower back.

Simon frowns as he watches Kieren resituate himself. “What are you doing?” he asks.

“This? How do you not know this? Everyone does this.” Kieren slaps the counter a few times for emphasis. “The movie thing. The sitting-on-counters thing. People always do this in movies. You have to stand in front of me, though.”

“Okay.” He moves slowly, but ultimately complies. Still, his eyebrows are raised, arms folded tight, and he really isn’t playing into this new Hollywood angle.

“Trust me. I’ve watched a lot of movies. And by that I mean I’ve been forced to watch a lot of movies,” Kieren reassures. 

“Stop. You’re going to summon your father.”

“Don’t even joke.” Kieren's eyes dart to the kitchen doorway, though he knows Steve won’t come within twenty feet of this room for a while. Possibly for the rest of his life. 

He looks down at his feet, swings them back and forth absently, his heels rattling against the bottom row of cabinets. “I feel, like, really cool, to be honest,” he says with a smile.

“You look really cool,” Simon agrees. The response time gives him away. 

“I’m already going to kiss you, you don’t have to lie to me.”

“Fine then, you look stupid.”

“Wow.” 

Kieren leans down, kissing him then, and thinks he should probably put one hand on the side of Simon’s face because that’s what you’re supposed to do. Granted it’s movies and TV doing that supposing, but he’s never claimed to be smarter than movies or TV. What he is, however, is forgetful, so the whole hand thing sort of slips his mind and instead he’s left with both hands anchoring him to the counter, gripping harder than strictly necessary. It’s Simon who does most of the work. Kieren figures that Simon owes him, after the sink thing and – to be honest – quite a few other, more important talking points they were going to have to address eventually. Then he figures that’s a bad attitude. Then he figures he doesn’t care about much of anything at all.


End file.
